The Long Island Connection

Amongst Friends,' his debut film about suburban Jewish gangsters, has earned young director Rob Weiss a quick ticket to Hollywood

A few years ago, the future was looking distinctly unpromising for Rob Weiss. He had dropped out of Manhattan's Parsons School of Design, where he studied film and fashion, and was then kicked out of an acting class at Greenwich Village's New School after becoming too violent during a performance exercise. In his early 20s, he was still living at his father's house in Lawrence, one of the Long Island suburban communities just east of Kennedy Airport that make up the wealthy, predominantly Jewish enclave called the Five Towns.

"Most of the kids from the Five Towns go off to college," says Weiss, now 26, "but there are always about 50 who don't. These are looked at as the losers, and if you stay behind, the losers are suddenly your friends."

Those "losers" became more than that; they became the inspiration for the main characters in "Amongst Friends," the low-budget film written and directed by Weiss that has earned him both critical praise and an entree into big-time Hollywood. Set in the Five Towns, the movie is a disturbingly personal account of a trio of Jewish ex-high school chums, who spurn the BMW bribes offered by their affluent parents to get them to apply to law school or MBA programs, and instead turn to drug-dealing and robbery.

Their criminal activities escalate to the point where they end up working for an old-time Jewish mobster, who owns a local nightclub they had earlier tried to hold up. "My god," the gangster tells one of his cronies, "these kids are us all over again."

Rob Weiss grew up in Baldwin, a middle-class Long Island commun-ity. When he was 16, his parents now divorced transferred him to an exclusive private school in Woodmere, one of the Five Towns, and later moved to the town themselves.

The Five Towns are notorious throughout the New York area as the reputed home of an extremely status-conscious, nouveau-riche, largely Jewish community. In a voice-over at the beginning of "Amongst Friends," Weiss himself describes it as a place where "you got judges living next to gamblers next to rabbis next to dentists."

Weiss, interviewed in the West Hollywood apartment where he now lives, describes his time there as a "wild experience." But, he adds, "What goes on there is what goes on anywhere else chaos. It was a fine place to live, though, and although some of the film critics said this is no place anyone would want to live, I didn't pan where I came from."

Weiss says he had always felt artistically inclined. "It's not like I was a complete goon or something," he insists, in a voice thick with the same Long Island accent (in which natives pronounce their home as "Lawn Guyland") that provides his movie with much of its gritty authenticity. "I know the articles about me make it seem as if I woke up one morning and just did it (the movie). But I knew I was an artist. It was just a matter of finding what medium it was that I wanted to work with.

"Film combined a lot of different elements that I liked painting, photography and lighting. It deals with people and their emotions. And on the external aspect, there was the business side of making movies, which I find real interesting."

Weiss originally intended "Amongst Friends" as a 16-mm short he could use as a calling card in Hollywood. But the scope of the project quickly outpaced his original plans. Ater two weeks of writing, he was holding a 90-page script. He raised a tenth of his eventual $ 900,000 budget on his own, and used the initial sum to shoot some key scenes involving two turbo-mouthed Italian hoods in warm-up suits, Vic and Eddie, who want to bankroll the purchase of a huge stash of dope. These scenes were used to lure investors, including Weiss's father a travel agent whose specialty is arranging gambling trips to Atlantic City and several of his business associates.

"One guy picked up my script," Weiss recounted, "weighed it in the air and said it felt like a $ 2,500 investment. He handed me the money on the spot. None of these guys wanted to read the script."

This was in September 1991, and the filmmakers including a cast of young unknowns were toiling day and night to meet a tough shooting schedule. At the end of one 18-hour day, rather than return to their homes, they decided to sleep on location. Mattresses were rented, but within moments of delivery, the police showed up. Some of the neighbors had concluded from the nature of the shipment that Weiss and his crew were shooting a porn movie.

"Amongst Friends" premiered earlier this year at Sundance, the annual Utah film festival run by Robert Redford for independent movies, which is attended by an army of Hollywood executives on the lookout for new talent. The film received an enthusiastic reaction, with press reports calling it a Jewish version of Martin Scorsese's Italian gangster epic "Goodfellas."

Distribution rights were snapped up by New Line Cinema, which specializes in offbeat and art-house films, and it was released in some two dozen theaters in July. Although "Amongst Friends" hasn't scored at the box-office earning only about a quarter of a million dollars many critics praised its convincing depiction of affluent suburban anomie. There were some dissenters though Weiss is particularly peeved by a review in the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, which complained that the movie's characters were hardly distinguishable as Jews because "Amongst Friends" failed to provide the requisite indulgences in Yiddishisms, deli scenes, or de rigueur references to bagels and lox.

"It was the worst," says Weiss of the review. "I wrote the movie from the perspective of a Jewish kid, but I never meant it to be a film about Jewish kids. I didn't write it to have these kids reflect any part of Judaism or mainstream Jewish life."